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Former Salesforce executive to steer FinancialForce through next phase of aggressive growth

16th January 2017

FinancialForce, a Cloud ERP vendor on the Salesforce Platform, has announced the appointment of Tod Nielsen as Chief Executive Officer and President. The appointment comes on the back of another strong year in which the company grew more than 40% and is rapidly approaching the $100 million annual revenue run rate milestone.

Nielsen, the former Executive Vice President of Platform at Salesforce, is a seasoned leader with a proven record of taking technology companies to the next level by accelerating their innovation and revenue growth.

As the Chief Executive Officer of Heroku, which Salesforce acquired in 2011, Nielsen redefined the company’s enterprise strategy, driving significant growth. As the Co-president of the Applications Platform Group and Chief Operating Officer at VMware, he helped drive a 9-fold increase in the company’s market cap to over 50 billion dollars.

Nielsen has held additional high profile positions throughout his career. Prior to VMware, he served as the Chief Executive Officer of Borland Corporation. Earlier, Nielsen served as Senior Vice President of Marketing and Global Sales Support for Oracle and Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for BEA Systems. Prior to BEA, he spent 12 years with Microsoft in various executive roles, including General Manager of Database and Developer Tools and Vice President of Microsoft's Platform group.

“Business applications and cloud computing platforms are reaching historically significant inflection points,” said Nielsen. “Cloud platforms have matured, setting the stage for businesses to run their entire application portfolio in the cloud because it is the smartest, safest and most efficient way to deploy business applications, especially ERP. Now companies can transform their business models, the way they engage with customers, and their applications to compete and thrive in the digital economy. FinancialForce was quick to recognize this opportunity and delivers on the promise of cloud applications. I’m excited to build on the company’s explosive growth and look forward to further innovating and redefining cloud ERP.”

“With more than two decades of experience leading high-growth business units at large technology vendors like Salesforce, VMware, Oracle and Microsoft, Tod has the knowledge, business sense, and leadership skills that will help FinancialForce thrive,” said Mike Rosenbaum, FinancialForce board member and Executive Vice President of CRM Applications at Salesforce. “He’s grown organizations to billions in revenue and I’m excited to have an executive of his caliber at the helm during this pivotal stage of FinancialForce’s growth.”

Jeremy Roche, former CEO of FinancialForce, will serve as Founder and special advisor to the management team and continue to work with FinancialForce investor Unit4 in an executive position to be formally announced next week. “Jeremy was one of the first to see the potential of building ERP applications on the Salesforce platform and has created a thriving company,” said Kevin Costello, chairman of the FinancialForce board of directors. “We thank him for paving the way and creating a great business for Tod and the team to scale.”

“Starting FinancialForce and having the chance to build and work with such a great team has been one of the most incredible and rewarding experiences of my career,” said Roche. “Together, we set out to do for the back office what Salesforce did for the front office, and we are well on our way. I’m delighted to hand over the reins to an executive of Tod’s experience to help us achieve the next stage of exponential growth.” said Roche.